Carbonaro Family

Vincenzo Carbonaro was born in the town of Torrenova in Sicily in 1926. As a child he lived close to the sea and was a good swimmer as were most other children of the town. He left school at the age of 15 and started work as a fisherman. When World War II broke out, the area they fished from was closed to fishing and Vince went to work from another town some distance away. On the first night they went to sea the British Royal Navy submarine Triumph came up alongside their fishing boat. They were fishing in an un-armed wooden built boat about 35 feet long. The six Italian fishermen on board were all lined up on deck together when the British submarine crew opened fire with machine guns from a distance of not more than 5 metres. One man got 24 bullets in his arm, another lost his teeth and also was hit by a bullet in his nose. Two men, including the Skipper, each lost a leg. The youngest on board was 14 ½ years old and he received a bullet that went straight his shoulder and out the other side. Vince (15) was the only one not wounded. He dived over the stern of the boat taking most of his clothes off in the water, thinking the submarine would move away, and that he would then stay with the boat until he could swim to the shore. However, as the submarine began towing the fishing boat out to sea, Vince realized he would then be too far out to eventually swim to the shore he let go. One of the English submarine crew, seeing Vince spoke (in Italian) directing him to join the others on board. He was pulled onto the submarine at 2.10 am on 27th August, 1941. Two months after being taken prisoner by the British RN submarine, Triumph was sunk by the Italian Destroyer Careni and by chance Vince’s brother Ross had been serving on her in the Italian Navy two months beforehand.

The submarine docked at Malta at 10 am seven days later at La Valetta where Vince and many others were kept in a prisoner of war camp for 17 months. He later became friends with one of the Maltese guards there and in unusual circumstances met up with him again in a restaurant in Perth many years later. Malta was the most bombed place of all during the whole War by the Italian and German Air Forces. It was the constant bombing by Germans, sometimes 400 in one night at every 5 minutes in their Messershmidts or Junkers aircraft that caused Vince to have ear trouble for the rest of his life. Other times there would be bombing raids every half hour all day long. The prisoners of war were housed in tents. Vince would shelter under a piece of thick metal high up in the camp area to watch the bombing. One day he saw a plane shot down and the German pilot’s parachute was caught in the tail piece. He cleared the parachute when close to the ground and surprisingly only suffered a broken leg. There was also a female Maltese administration officer by the name of Vincenza Carbonaro (no relation) at the same time Vince was prisoner of war there and she also became friendly and assisted him.

After 17 months all the prisoners of War were moved from Malta on four US cargo ships travelling in convoy surrounded on the outside by at least eight Destroyers for protection. On this trip to Alexandria in Egypt Allied aircraft also protected the ships from overhead. When they arrived at the harbour it was seen to be full of British and US ships with just their masts still visible. They had been sunk by the Germans and Italians. Vince was held there for another 3 ½ years, before returning to his home in Sicily.

Back in Sicily Vince married Maria Monastra on 4th November, 1950. Vince had an aunt who lived in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, and she and her husband sponsored Vince in the Australian Migrant Scheme. He arrived in Fremantle on the ship Cirenea in 1951. After 3 months working in Kalgoorlie cutting sandalwood, Vince was allowed to come to Fremantle and start fishing with an Italian skipper onboard the Garibaldino. The boat travelled to Lancelin and fished there for maybe a month at a time, taking their catch to Lancelin where the crayfish were processed. There were processors in Lancelin at that time. Vince also fished seasonally at Shark Bay.

Maria was able to join Vince in WA in 1955 and after a short while they purchased their first home in King William St, South Fremantle. In 1956 Vince bought the boat Torrenova which he then anchored at Ledge Pt. It was at this time that Vince was introduced to Bruce Gaston who had purchased a building block at the first land auction at Ledge Pt. He built a timber and asbestos hut for Vince and his crew to live in during the fishing seasons. This was the start of a lifelong friendship between the two families. Vince was extremely generous by bringing in crayfish, octopus or fish for Muriel and showing her how to cook the various sea foods.

The vehicle sand track from Gingin to Ledge was initially marked by Roy Green dropping little bags of flour from a plane. Later the road through Gingin was improved, but it still meant that a shovel had to be carried at all times to get vehicles out of the sand when they got bogged.

At that time there were no shops at Ledge Pt and no school at Lancelin for the children, so most of the Italian wives remained in Fremantle and suburbs during the summer fishing season.

Vince’s first boat was Torrenova and his crew was brother Ross Carbonaro, Charlie Monzú and Giuseppe (Joe) Monastra. There was no cost for a licence to crayfish in the beginning of the industry. Other boats at that early time were Juanita skipper Roy Green, Dante skipper Con Iannello, Sea Horse skipper George Merandi, Advance skipper Vince La Rosa, Aquila skipper Tindaro Berengheli, Fantasma skipper S Castrovinci and Josephine T Frenis. The first season Vince fished at Ledge Pt the only Australian boat was that of Roy Green and one of his crew was Keith Sloan. All the other fishermen were Italian migrants.

In the 1950s the season would open in November and Vince and his crew would have worked through Winter preparing the ropes and making craypots. The first floats used were slabs of cork with a strip of paint on to indicate which boat they belonged to. Over the years the floats progressed from cork through to steel, to polystyrene and now to nylon. The boats would travel from Fremantle to Ledge Pt in about 8 hours. The pots would be taken up by the Fremantle Co-op truck. The season usually ended around the end of April or beginning of May depending upon the weather. All the pots would be brought in and old ones discarded and good ones taken again by truck down to Fremantle on the Co-op truck until fishermen established homes at Ledge Pt where they could be stored. The boats had roughly 130 pots each. The pots were all circular cane stick variety. Vince kept cray pots under the Gaston’s house after the first couple of seasons. The boats would travel back to Fremantle and go on slips, get painted and anchor in Fremantle Harbour, because there was no marina at that time.

Before the Fremantle Fishermen’s Co-op built huts for the fishermen at Ledge Pt a number lived in tents in the sand hills. In the years Vince fished from Ledge Pt they never caught less than 50,000 lbs per boat per season from November to April. When they went out to the Continental Shelf during December and January they would need to leave the moorings at 1 am and often not arrive back in until 5 pm. It would take them 5 hours to get out there travelling about 8 knots. It was at that period, possible to catch Jewfish from the outer side of the reef - just past where the boats are now moored.

Cray fishermen left their wooden dinghies on the beach every night and they went from beach to boat by sculling with a single oar over the dinghy stern. They needed to reach the craypots by daylight so the time the left varied slightly over the season. On a typical day they would be leave by 4 am after a cup of coffee of freshly ground beans. They would take a thermos or two of tea and biscuits, as well as salami sandwiches to eat during the day. They never arrived back at Ledge before 2 pm at the earliest. The crayfish in hessian bags, (weighing about 40-45 lbs) were carried ashore on the shoulders of the fishermen, to a 4 wheel drive vehicle waiting on the beach. It was an early model 4WD and sometimes they had to carry the bags all the way to the shed at the end of the jetty. There was a set of scales in the shed and all bags were weighed before going to Fremantle or Lancelin for processing, in the cray truck, which was not a freezer truck in the early days. At the end of the day the fishermen would have a meal of pasta, sometimes fish and about twice per week a meat dish. Occasionally a BBQ. They listened to the radio for news and weather in days before TV. They had a kero fridge like most other people to keep their food.

The Fremantle Fishermen’s Co-op driver to Ledge Pt was Nick Lavaghetta, who also retired in the year 2000 after starting in the 1950s. He also lives in Hilton, not far from Vince. Supplies were ordered from a company named Oceania Trading (See Sgro Family story) by the cray truck driver and delivered as necessary. The cray truck would bring any mail and fresh bread every day – Fishermen’s loaves. Bait, ropes and fuel in drums was brought up by the cray truck. Before the jetty was built for the boats to re-fuel at, diesel was taken on board in drums, because the engines were so much smaller in the early days.

In 1968 Vince had a new boat built which he named Messina. He then fished from that boat with crew Natalie Monastra, Sam Monastra and Natalie Monastra. Vince Carbonaro and his extended family group had three boats working from Ledge Pt and they were named Torrenova with skipper Ross Carbonaro, Messina skippered by Vince Carbonaro and Palermo skippered by Paul Carbonaro. They all fished from Ledge until December 1969 when the Palermo was sunk by a freak wave and all the crew members, Paulo Carbonaro, Giuseppe Monastra and Salvatore (Sam) Monastra were lost. Vince pulled all his pots from the ocean and sold them on the beach and has never returned to Ledge Pt.

After two years Vince returned to fishing from Fremantle in Messina and later Messina II. He eventually retired in year 2000. Vince lived in the house in Collinson St, Beaconsfield which he built in 1971.

Vince is survived by his wife Maria, daughters Connie and Shelley, sons-in-law Wayne and Phil, grandchildren Belinda, Damien, Emma and Justin.